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To: Cogito Ergo Sum who wrote (7273)	8/17/2001 1:09:57 AM
From: smolejv@gmx.net	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

Hi KasteCo: re white color and black color - you're of course right re their reflectance properties. Black absorbs light and will for instance heat up in the sun. White just mirrors it back. However, one point sometimes overlooked: black is effective also in radiating away excess energy and white is a sort of insulator in this regard. It would make for instance quite a difference weatherwise if snow were black. The one aspect overlooked in the highways discussion is as follows: ok, let's make them white, so they will reflect and not heat up. Where will they reflect it to? You can be sure that only a small part will leave the earth and the majority will end in our environment. From the point of view of the sun as the source of energy, nothing much would change, the so called albedo - how black looks the earth to it - would not change appreciably. IOW the same amount of radiation sun sends us would get absorbed anyhow. Only the distribution of the energy sent may shift away from highways (or some other target X, we decided to paint white) to other targets: Highways cooler, country, buildings around them hotter. Now these targets themselves are not 100% white either, so they would take a little send back a little. A pretty good guess would be a eventual additional warming of the atmosphere - not very much in comparison to other sources -. All this so we would have white highways, which would for instance give us significantly higher snow headaches than the black highways we have now. The way out of it is a) to try to introduce less human-generated energy into the system and/or b) to take out as much of the sun energy as we can use out of it. The name of the game thus I think is efficiency in a) and among other things reforestation in b). Note that oceans as excellent energy reservoirs are doing what they can, but we have to live with el Ninos and other "collateral damages". And fact is, it's much more complicated than that (sg) dj dj